UC Berkeley’s housing crisis is 50 years in the making, and students say, ‘We get screwed at every turn’
Kennedy owned a piece of property on Oxford Street, directly across from campus, that was approved for 56 apartments. Kennedy, who was short of cash at the time, was willing to sell it to the university for a bargain price of $500,000. There was some initial interest from UC Berkeley’s administration, but after months of going back and forth, the deal fizzled out… “UC Berkeley couldn’t get it together to buy it,” Kennedy said. “At that time they were a bureaucracy that couldn’t act nimbly if their lives depended on it.” A quarter-century later, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that UC Berkeley’s life — or at least its ability to grow as one of the premier public universities in the world — depends on whether it can act nimbly to produce student housing as fast as possible.
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by J.K. Dineen, The San Francisco Chronicle.